Writer: Amanda Dibando Awanjo
Essay Mentor: Kemi Adeyemi
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Remnants of an Advanced Technology by Alisha Wormsley with mentorship from Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels and on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 15 – October 22, 2022 The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
As a child, I sat at the feet of my mother and foremothers. Listening to their stories, I was moved to silence and awe by a grace that felt as vast as space. Ancestral by nature, this form of knowledge plays time for a fool, eschewing linearity for something more. There are not enough words, spaces, and worlds dedicated to the richness of Black women. Alisha Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology (CUE Art Foundation, 2022) draws from a deep well of matriarchal history, imbuing it with techno-archival methods to position Black women as ever-expanding creators of their own worlds. Featuring video, text, sound, immersive installation, and sculpture, the exhibition opens up the potential for new ways of knowing ourselves, our past, and our worlds by connecting us to the radical power of Black women’s sovereign creation through time.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Wormsley works fluidly through various materials, combining and enmeshing them to play with their physical and spiritual potential. The works in Remnants of an Advanced Technology draw from Children of NAN, a material and theoretical archive that Wormsley has constructed over the years; an assemblage of objects and ideas grounded in Black women’s wisdom, magic, and dreaming. The archive serves as a poetic survival guide that flows and grows through time, and that informs all of Wormsley’s work.
Remnants of an Advanced Technology by Alisha B Wormsley, mentored by Joeonna Belladoro-Samuels. Presented by CUE Art Foundation, 2022. Photo by David Michael Cortes.
In Remnants of an Advanced Technology, Wormsley presents a series of twenty-six photo-based quilts that prompt a consideration of the complex roadways of Black women’s futurity. The quilts use as their source material African textiles, repurposed photographic wallpaper from Wormsley’s previous exhibitions, embroidery, and other types of mark making. Varying in size and shape, they are suspended from the ceiling, making it possible to walk around—but not through—them. Their backings are embroidered with maps and messages from Children of NAN. To the artist, these photo-based quilts serve as maps themselves, as the embedded instruction of their embroidery intersects with the long dreamed-of future that the photographs they carry embody.
Interplay of form and time is a key theme of the exhibition, as Wormsley’s work moves seamlessly between the ancient and the contemporary. In her tapestries, Wormsley has physically woven together natural fibers that are dyed a muted color palette of beige, brown, and black. They stand in close conversation with, but also in stark contrast to, the bursts of color and exuberant patterns of the quilts. Each one anchored by a curved branch, the tapestries utilize simple shapes like triangles and circles, with their fibers breaking from the weaving at certain points to hang below. The rustic fabric and the weathered smoothness of the wood call forward the timelessness of the earth, while the metal circuit boards and plates woven into them speak a distinctly technological language. The small metal plates are embossed with text such as: “It is right that a black woman should lead. A womb is what God made in the beginning. And in the womb was born time and all that fills up space. So says the beautiful spirit.” This quotation is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1920s anthropological study, “Mother Catherine.” Into it, Wormsley inserts the word “black,” further emphasizing Black women’s spiritual practice and survival ethos. The tapestries pull at the intersection of craft and code, asking viewers to question the lineages of contemporary technologies, while also imagining new modes of making and putting forth the role of Black women as technologists within their own right.
Alisha B Wormsley, So Says The Beautiful Spirit: Daughter, 2020; cotton and wool, motherboards, and vinyl text. Photo courtesy the artist.
Remnants of an Advanced Technology features many moments of stillness and ponderance, especially expressed in Wormsley’s sixteen works with glass, made in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Glass Center. These glass vessels, stained in warm and jewel tones, are each filled with plants, candles, herbs, books, and ephemera. They are decorated with collaged images from the Children of NAN archive, as well as with images of Black women from Wormsley’s previous projects. The inlaid images, some embossed with gold leaf, form a catalogue of otherworldly Black womanhood that evokes the imagery of Afrofuturism and science fiction. The vessels are arranged on a large wooden platform and together create an altar, an honored and holy space filled with tokens of gratitude and homage. Gold-accented candles, some of which are molded into women’s bodies, are interspersed throughout. Working in tandem with the quilts and the tapestries, the vessels underscore Black women’s spirituality, creativity, and persistence, centering their ability to survive and thrive with joy, love, and community.
The works exhibited in Remnants of an Advanced Technology call to mind Toni Morrison’s narration of healing methodology in her 1987 novel Beloved. In the book, she writes:
“They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning there was sound and they all knew what that sound sounded like…the voices of the women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.” (Morrison, 308)
This moment in the narrative of Beloved represents the birth of a new timeline, the creation of a new world for the women and their progeny. The characters’ migration “back to the beginning,” is crucially multidisciplinary; they seek to use all possible tools and technologies to build a new future on the back of an ancient bubbling pain. Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology similarly embeds the notion of healing as a multidisciplinary venture by connecting technologies of survival across time to Black women’s methodological ethic of care and liberation.
Wormsley’s growing archive boldly asserts that Black women are worlds unto themselves. I first came into contact with her work in 2019, when I encountered it in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, in the form of a billboard that read: “There are Black People in the Future.” Radical in its simplicity and assuredness, this statement affirms the lingering truth of Black survival in our violently anti-Black world. The billboard was also evidence, to me, of the potential of Black women to radically hold public space, both in the present and in the future. Wormsley continues these legacies in Remnants of an Advanced Technology by manifesting her radical dreamwork—and that of many others, past, present, and future—into a varied, dynamic, and inspiring presentation of work that holds plainly the truth of Black women’s power.
About the Writer
Amanda Dibando Awanjo is a Cameroonian American researcher, historian, and artist. She holds a PhD in Critical Cultural Studies in Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Inspired by W.E.B Du Bois’ 1927 question, “What will people in a hundred years say of Black Americans?,” her research explores the role of Black women creators in the evolution of Afrofuturism. Through fellowships with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the University of Pittsburgh's University Art Gallery, her research has expanded to explorations of the visual culture surrounding Black girlhood in the 20th century.
About the Writing Mentor
Kemi Adeyemi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of FeelsRight: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the volume Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Kemi founded and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary black art. She currently serves as dramaturg for Will Rawls’ project [SICCER]. She has recently curated solo shows by Katherine Simóne Reynolds (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 2021) and Amina Ross (Ditch Projects, 2019), as well as co-curated a group show called unstable objects at the Alice Gallery (2017)
About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Learn more about the program here. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.